Mobile gaming has shifted, again. The hypercasual genre has begun to dominate the free app charts. In 2017 Ketchapp (now owned by Ubisoft) started a revolution of simplicity in game design with mobile titles such as Tower or Ballz. The games focused on clear visuals and simple mechanics and very light progression systems. They also importantly removed IAP as the core monetization and replaced it with Advertising revenue.

The market for location-based gaming is heating up this summer. We’re finally starting to see some major developers come out with an answer to Niantic’s Pokemon Go, a game that is now nearly 2 years old and going stronger than ever. Pokemon Go is a staple in the Top Grossing Charts, and with user numbers reaching an all-time high this month, it’s likely to continue. As such, there are many attempting to repeat its success. Niantic plan another title this summer, “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite”. NEXT Games have soft launched their “Walking Dead: Our World”. Ludia + Universal just launched “Jurassic World Alive” in tandem with the new movie launch.
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Sims Mobile has big shoes to fill. Everyone knows The Sims. The sandbox life simulation has not only defined its own genre but counts among the top selling game series ever. After four major releases on PC/consoles and countless DLCs, EA and Maxis come with a second big attempt to succeed in the mobile sphere. Sims Mobile (Android, iOS) launched globally early March 2018. It’s hard to avoid comparison to the original PC game given it was made by the same developer and publisher, as well as visual style and gameplay elements.
What makes The Sims franchise stand out is by far the freedom of choice in playing out your personal story. Therefore it’s interesting to take a look what kind of changes are introduced in transition to a free-to-play

The latest Clan Wars update dropped for Clash Royale this month adding a new competitive mode that pits clan vs clan in a 2 day competitive event. Clash Royale, the poster child of innovative mobile battle arena gameplay has been losing engagement and viewer across YouTube and other streaming platforms. In fact, Clash Royale's quarterly revenues are around a half of what they were just a year ago. The games industry is a fickle place where gamers quickly switch between titles to play whatever is hottest at the time. Clan Wars is Supercell’s attempt to lure loyal fans back and give them a new reason to play the game?

At GDC 2018, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a Deconstructor of Fun talk, which Anil Das-Gupta and I deconstructed two top mobile games. I broke down Golf Clash, and Anil broke down Rules of Survival.

It’s close to that time of year when everyone in the industry gets ready to take a plane halfway around the world to meet the gaming community at GDC 2018. Personally speaking, it’s one of the only times I see half of my ex-colleagues each year.

Recent weeks have seen much debate and controversy around the subject of Loot Boxes – randomized rewards are given to players in exchange for hard currency. Particularly in premium games, players feel ripped off if they have to pay to progress or to be competitive in P2P – especially when they don’t even know whether the box they’re paying contains something worthwhile.

Imagine you’re in the middle of a long road trip with your family. The drive starts off at a fairly speedy pace of 75 mph. Everything is going great; you’re on time, you’re happy, and each member of your family is gripped to their respective phones.

Due to the Star Wars Battlefront II controversy, the industry is taking a far closer look at what monetization practices are ethical, and whether the industry can police itself or needs further regulation to avoid misuse.

For many developers, player retention is considered the most important metric for a free to play game. Every game company obsesses about reaching higher and higher retention to ensure their user base grows and grows.

Happy New Year! In amongst all the disregarded party poppers, half drunk glasses of Prosecco, and trays loaded with fast drying out canapés, we can confidently report it is indeed 2018.
To start the new year off on the right foot, we’ve decided to come proffering gifts: namely, a new Free to Play Bible, building on its existing foundations to offer both upcoming and established mobile developers the resources

This two-part series explores the modern practices in mobile game development by interviewing 9 mobile game studios. The work is based on a master’s thesis Conquering the Mobile from Aalto University, Finland wherein you can find detailed references to cases and articles.

At the beginning of this year, Peak games soft-launched a game called “Toon Blast”. Some developers took a look, but most pushed it aside. The game appeared to be a direct re-skin of Toy Blast, Peak games’ original hit game.

This two-part series explores the modern practices in mobile game development by interviewing 9 mobile game studios. The work is based on a Aalto University master’s thesis Conquering the Mobile wherein you can find detailed references to cases and articles.

Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money is an unusual idle game. The game features a very niche license and very unconventional gameplay. It defies many of the genre’s conventions, adding elements like an episodic linear narrative, very rigid ascension requirements, and an extensive gacha system that is woven deep into the game’s core. Yet the game has managed to be both a commercial and critical success, averaging at least a 4.5 star rating on every version and setting revenuerecords for the idle game genre. This is an insider’s view of how this unconventional design was born, and how and why it works.

At one stage in your career you’ve begun to care about data. You decide that you want to know what your players are doing, so you start tracking gameplay events. You track everything. With a flurry of code your app is sending tracking events for every card combination, move, spell effect and battle stat!

Rewarded Video Ads have been a constant, dominating trend in free to play over the last few years. Starting with companies like Ketchapp and Futureplay, it became abundantly clear that games can drive meaningful revenue from video advertisements, and advertisers can find a captive audience in mobile players. In the last couple years, Video Ads have reached a tipping point. No longer seen as superficial revenue on top of IAP revenue, designing for video ad revenue has become the dominant revenue growth area for free to play companies. Designing for video ads has allowed for innovation in the maturing mobile space that is much needed.

When Supercell launches a new game, it sends shock waves around our industry and players alike. On June 14th, Supercell released Brawl Stars — and in typical fashion, we all jumped on to give it a try.

Creating a novel mobile experience is a hard task. So when a novel mechanic appears it’s a breath of fresh air from the consistent Match-3 re-skins or Clash of Clones that more frequently release on a Thursday… The hardest part is making it stick. Getting people to come back and play everyday is the area that companies focus on during a soft launch. Those prototypes with the highest retention usually make it to market. Stickiness is slightly different from retention. It’s usually measured by DAU/MAU and I like to think of it as how many loyal fans are in your game. The more similar your DAU is to your MAU the stronger the loyalty.

View-to-play is fast becoming the new dominant monetization model in the mobile marketplace. For the last few years, game companies like Futureplay, NEXT Games, Gram Games and Ketchapp have shown that you can create successful free-to-play games which drive sustainable revenue without focusing solely on In-App Purchases. Games like Crossy Road, Tap Titans, and Endless Runners like Despicable Me have reported that more than 50% of their revenue comes from video ads.

Messenger games could be the next land grab opportunity in the mobile space. I spoke at Digital Dragons conference in Poland, evaluating the different messenger platforms (iMessage, Facebook Messenger and WeChat) as potential routes to market. There are still a large number of restrictions on what you can do as a developer, but the scale and gamer engagement seen on new Messenger platforms is a positive sign.

This post is the first of many to be done in cooperation with Deconstructor Of Fun. As announced by BothGunsBlazing, Anil Das-Gupta and I are joining forces with DeconstructorOfFun.com. Deconstructor has been an amazing resource for me and many mobile free to play designers around the industry so it's an honour to be contributing to such an exceptional site. A big thank you to Michail Katkoff, Anil Das-Gupta, Dave Cross and Alex Collins for their help with this post. Looking forward to what's to come!

You may have missed it. Over the easter long weekend, starting on April 14th, a new contender took the #1 Top Grossing spot in the United States: Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle. Moving aside games like Pokemon Go, Clash Royale and Game of War from their usual top spots.

The latest release from Nimblebit features the Bitizens and this time they’ve used an idle/clicker/tapper crossed with a city builder in their new release of Bit City (iOS / Android). I’ve been a long time fan of the Nimblebit team, started by the brothers Dave and Ian Marsh back in 2007 but expanded to a number of other key staff. My personal favourite game of theirs was Tiny Tower, but I've also played and churned out from most of their newest releases. Pocket Frogs deserves a design mention as it still has one of the best collection/rarity mechanics of any game that I've played on mobile. Nimblebit specialises in creating a collecting or simulation experience around common everyday objects.

Video ad revenue now accounts for a large proportion of most casual free to play mobile games. Companies like Hipster Whale, Futureplay and the publisher Ketchapp have built business models focussed on rewarded video ads. This shows many of the similarities of the shift from premium to freemium. As an indie developer it’s relatively simple to drop a video ad into your game, but do you understand where the money comes from? In this piece we breakdown how the flow of money gets from the advertiser to your bank account.

Nintendo is the one bright light in the mobile games industry. Finally entering the fray after years of resisting the trend, since last summer Nintendo has launched 3 top grossing titles: Pokemon Go, Super Mario Run, and now Fire Emblem Heroes. Nintendo is doing what no other free-to-play developer has done. They’ve broken into a market that many have long assumed to be completely locked up.

Supercell has dropped a bomb on the mobile gaming market. Their new game, Clash Royale, soft launched just as 2016 got started. They have soft launched in only 8 countries, but this game is already a sure success. Supercell has already committed the game to a global launch in March.

When a player first starts a new free to play game, they have very little intention of spending money. No matter how good your game is, no matter how good your brand is, it's unlikely that players are willing to drop money soon after starting the app. There’s a period of time where players wait and experiment before making their first purchase.

Free to play on mobile is changing quickly every day. The audience is maturing. Their tastes are changing, and now I feel is just the calm before the storm. The stasis that exists on the top of the AppStore can only hold for so long, the mobile audience’s tastes will change, it’s now up to designers to find out how.

Fallout Shelter shocked many people when it reached the top grossing charts. Many (including myself) have been preaching about the unchanging stasis that exists at the top of the AppStore, and Bethesda came in and changed that completely.

In August I spoke at GDC Europe in Köln about the independent team structure at Wooga. Not everyone knows this, but at Wooga, each team has the final say on all decisions regarding their project. The CEO & Management cannot tell the team what to work on. The team decides on everything including what technology to use, what genre to go after, and how to execute on it.

Energy seems to be hated by designers and players alike, so why does it endure as the hallmark of casual F2P games? The fact is that whilst it’s a crude mechanic, it’s also an efficient one, delivering several functions in one easily implementable feature.

Supercell’s most recent soft launch is called Smash Land. It’s been in soft launch phase in Canada and Australia since March 31st 2015 (About 2 months from this post). There is no doubt that Supercell’s soft launches are huge news for the mobile free to play industry. Supercell is notoriously picky about what games that make it to soft launch. Each new game goes through rigorous internal feedback, and only the best games survive. The games that hit soft launch are games that Supercell genuinely believes have a shot at the Top Grossing charts.

Blizzard’s Hearthstone has defined collectable card games (CCGs) on mobile over the past year, and with the recent launch of the versions for smart phones on both iOS and Android the mobile revenues have rocketed roughly sevenfold.

Idle games are an exciting new genre that I expect to expand greatly in the coming years on mobile. Idle games, Clicker games, or “games that play themselves” is a baffling genre. Inexplicably these games are dominating many of the popular flash portals and shooting up the charts on mobile. Make it Rain by 337 Games, Tap Titans by Game Hive and now AdVenture Capitalist by Kongregate have all shown that this genre has a rightful place on the AppStore.

Recently I spoke at GDC 2015 in San Francisco with my colleague Sebastian Nußbaum. We conducted a talk called "In it for the long haul: How Wooga boosts long term retention". We were both amazed by the response. The GDC feedback was extremely positive: we ranked #1 of all F2P talks in the GDC Summits.

I feel like gifting has a bad name in games. Like the term “social” it has been ascribed to Facebook games that often implement interesting features in unexciting ways. Understand the psychology behind gifting in general – the phenomenon that is ubiquitous to all human culture and almost every human interaction – and I think things get a little more interesting, as well as suggest features that would work better than the average Facebook game.

Games are content, and so the economics of games are largely the economics of content. Content is what players pay for, and content is what takes time and money to build, with both the quality and amount of content increasing production costs. I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Inquisition recently, and having a great time. I’ve already sunk just over 20 hours into it, and if friends and reviews are to be believed, I have at least another 30 to go before I finish the main storyline.

All games feature three dimensions that determine player success: skill, stats and luck are required to win and progress in a game. However many prototypes and many games that I play each day seem to struggle with this mixture.

It’s hard to believe that the App Store is only six and a half years old – it was launched in July 2008 with just 800 apps. Now there are 800 apps downloaded every second – 2 billion a month – and the number of apps available has grown more than 1,000 fold to 850,000.

We don’t tend to typically think about games as emotional experiences, and perhaps because of this, the most interesting talks I saw at GDC 2013 were about games that had made people cry. Crying is not something that we expect from games, yet if a book, film or play made us cry we would think that a great achievement. Instead, we expect games to be fun, which whilst pleasant, is not a deep emotional experience. However, the games that do go beyond fun to deliver real drama are some of the most interesting, memorable and successful games out there.

Starting a new game is a daunting task. You operate in a design vacuum. The possibilities are nearly endless. The chance of failure incredibly high. Logic and reason of what games make it to the top is alchemy, and mostly just biased observations. Coming up with what the next hit game will be is a bit like throwing darts while blind.

Facebook has had a big impact on games. Before Facebook, video games were seen as an antisocial activity for spotty boys hiding in their bedrooms. Together with the ubiquitous usage of smart phones and Nintendo’s family marketing of the Wii, the perception of both the gender bias and social nature of video games is gradually shifting.

In order to be successful on the App Store a lot has to go right. Since 2012, the App Store has hit a point of maturity. The top grossing charts are in stasis with very little change from month to month. The winners of the App Store have been decided, and now the remaining developers are trying desperately to hold on to their existing market niches. Just recently (January 2014) in a report by Gartner they estimate by 2018 that less than 0.01% of all consumer mobile apps will be deemed a commercial success.

The mobile App Store is a mature, saturated market. If you are a newcomer to the space thinking that there is still a chance to win, then you're too late. That only existed from 2008-2011. Since 2012 the space has been a rapidly maturing industry. Innovation is scarce, barriers to entry are higher than ever, and the aim of hitting a top 10 grossing game is a seemingly impossible feat. The winners of mobile have been decided: they have the money, the long funnel, and the users to be able to dominate the top grossing charts.

Content pacing is the core of proper long-term retention in free to play. In order for players to stick around for months and years, you need to ensure that they are consuming your content at a pace that is healthy. A Free-To-Play designer’s main responsibility is to maximise the player’s enjoyment using the minimum amount of content necessary. In order to do this, many games try to influence the player to replay the same content over and over again. This has coined a term in free to play: “Grinding”: when a player repeats the same content or level many, many, many times in order to uncover a reward.

Mobile Session Design defines a game’s ability to pace its content and create strong long term retention. It’s one of the biggest indicators for a game’s long term success. I’ve spoken about a number of considerations you need to have when designing sessions:

Tutorials and onboarding is an absolutely key process in mobile games. The less your game costs to the player, the more pressure it puts on your tutorial. Players won’t think twice about leaving a free game and not coming back. If it’s not the game they believed it was from the beginning, they will move on to another.

The iOS platform has a lot of options for designing touch mechanics. Use of the accelerometer, touch screen, microphone can all be used to create a compelling mechanic. Each control option has pros and cons, and it is important to be aware of them as you design your mechanics.

Back in 2012, I was actually writing a book. I had a publisher lined up, but in the end the amount of time required became overwhelming and the publisher lost faith in the success of the book. Lucky for you, I can now give away this information for free!